Real Life(78)

Wallace considers the frozen slabs of tilapia in their individually wrapped, flash-frozen sleeves. He considers putting them in the microwave, zapping them quickly, and then throwing them into the batter and the grease. He considers the relative risk, considers the accumulation of bacteria, the chance of those bacteria colonizing the insides of their bodies, making them ill, making them vomit, making them shit.

He dips the fish into the water. It will be fine. He lets them float to the surface in the large bowl. They will thaw quickly. They are thin, after all, and not like the fatty fish they caught in Alabama and gutted and cleaned. These fish have never seen a river or a pond in their lives. They have been grown to fat contentment in tanks, raised expressly to be eaten, like the people who live in this city, their lives a series of narrowly constructed tubes filled with the nutrient-rich water they consume without even having to think about it. That’s all culture is, after all, the nutrients pervading the air we breathe, diffusing into and out of people, a passive process.

Is it into this culture that he is to emerge? Into the narrow, dark water of real life? He remembers Simone, leaning in toward him, the world vast and blue beyond her window, the kindness in her face as she told him that he needed to think about what he wants from life. He remembers the gentleness of her voice, the awful horror of that gentleness. He could stay in her lab and in graduate school. He could live his life on the other side of the glass, watching real life pass him by. Staying would be so simple, requiring no effort at all except to put his head down as if in prayer and let the worst of it pass over him.

Why go out there to be like these fish, like the people at the pier, bloated and commercial and with so little desire in life except to see the next day, nothing except the pure biology of it all, the part of life that must, by necessity, resist death, linking day upon day upon day, time meaningless, like water?

But to stay in graduate school, to stay where he is, means to accept the futility of his efforts to blend in seamlessly with those around him. It is a life spent swimming against the gradient, struggling up the channel of other people’s cruelty. It grates him to consider this, the shutting away of the part of him that now throbs and writhes like a new organ that senses so keenly the limitations of his life.

Stay here and suffer, or exit and drown, he thinks.

He dips the battered fish into the hot oil, and it spits and leaps and crackles. He burns the tip of his finger, but it’s numb. There are four pieces of fish in the oil now, all of them obscurely shaped and vaguely human, like dolls made of clay.

Miller is still against the counter. He’s pulled one of Wallace’s oversize sweaters on, and he’s wearing shorts without underwear. Miller’s body makes Wallace’s clothes look childlike. The knobs of his spine are clear in the way he’s bent over with his arms folded under his chin. The boyishness in his face is back.

Wallace fries the fish quickly, turning each piece just as it begins to brown so that it is crispy but not dry or burned. They eat the fish hot out of the grease over paper towels, biting into the white flesh, which steams the moment it touches the air. They ought to wait until it cools, Wallace suggests, but Miller, no longer neat, is eating voraciously, chewing and chomping. Grease slides down his fingers and his palms. And Wallace licks it clean, which makes Miller look at him firmly, his eyes glossy with want. They eat sitting next to each other on the counter, their thighs touching, eating because they don’t have to talk as long as their mouths are doing something else. And what would they talk about, anyway?

This too could be his life, Wallace thinks. This thing with Miller, eating fish in the middle of the night, watching the gray air of the night sky over the roof next door. This could be their life together, each moment shared, passed back and forth between each other to alleviate the pressure, the awful pressure of having to hold on to time for oneself. This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other’s hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.

The fish tastes good—hot, buttery, smooth, salt and pepper and a little vinegar, which was his father’s secret. In those years they all lived together, his father did all the cooking, and his mother worked. In those years, his father cooked for him all manner of delicious foods. In those years, his father soothed him with food, with pink-dyed pickled eggs, or sliced strawberries, or mango, or papaya. His father introduced him to all sorts of furry sour fruits, as they sat together on the rickety porch in the summer sun, their skin turning the color of clay, eating off paper plates. How has Wallace forgotten this? The sticky sweetness of those mango slices, the sharp sourness of kiwi as his father taught him to choose the ripest ones, the ones that were firm but not too firm, and perfectly green, prickly in your palms at the grocery store.

Miller offers Wallace the last piece of fish. Wallace clears his throat, shakes his head.

“No, that’s okay,” he says. “You finish.” He hops down from the counter and washes his hands in the sink. Miller watches him. Wallace can feel his eyes sliding over him, checking for something, anything. Wallace smiles.

“What are you thinking about? You’re a million miles away.”